Over the last week or so, I’m noticing Google issuing manual actions for excessive use of AI-generated content.
Since the introduction of ChatGPT, many sites have been trying to use different programmatic approaches to use AI-generated content at scale and rank well in Google search results.
I think to control the quality of the search results and not have too much of AI-generated pages rank in top results, Google introduced the scaled content abuse spam policy back in March 2024 when they rolled out the core update as well.
In that policy, it’s clearly mentioned that excessive use of AI-generated content and using generative AI tools to create content, is something that may lead to the violation of this policy if the overall content being created is not helpful for the users and there isn’t much of additional value add for the users.
Just in the last couple of months, I have noticed that many large sites, which have good enough authority are trying to leverage AI-generated content and creating it at mass scale in order to game Google’s ranking systems and rank at top positions.
So probably to control that, Google is now issuing these Scaled Content Abuse manual actions.
Also in the manual actions messages which Google is sending out to the sites. It clearly says that the manual action is issued because Google’s web spam team have noticed that there is a large-scale content abuse.
And that’s why I think business management teams who have decided to use AI-generated content at scale should now get really, really careful.
Because probably over the next couple of weeks or months, their site may also come under the radar of someone from Google’s web spam team and they might review it. If they notice that there is excessive use of AI-generated content and overall those pages are not helpful for the users, then Google might also a manual action for it.
And of course, this leads to the complete visibility drop of the site from Google search results and it no longer showing up in the results.
And if already got this manual action then best step forward is to remove AI generated content from site or no index it so that it longer show up in Google’s Search Results then apply for lifting of the manual action.
Also I’ve created this simple Quiz about AI generated content and Scaled Content Abuse spam policy. Site owners and SEO professionals can use this to test their understanding of Google’s policies about these topics.
(Adding here on 17th June) I published this page on 3rd June and since then have been doing further analysis. And someone from Originality AI’s team reached out to me after noticing my post LinkedIn post about Scaled Content Abuse. And gave me access to the not yet launched tool, Originality AI Bulk Scan which can do analysis of pages at large scale and assign a confidence score to each page if on a scale of 0 to 100. Where more the score is, more are chances of page being AI generated.
Using this tool from Originality and running through the pages of this site which I posted about on X last week.
It turned out that most of pages on this site are AI generated, I can’t say for sure if these pages are generated using AI or not. But it seems like yep they are and probably that might be a factor which led to a Scaled Content Abuse manual action for this site.
Here is what I got from Originality AI’s Bulk Scan for the site, the Semrush graph for which I’ve shared in my X post above.
I’m still monitoring a lot of large sites in APAC which from my perspective are clearly doing Scaled Content Abuse and should get hit either by manual action or algorithmically. Let’s see what happens with them over time cuz they are ranking very well and that should bring those AI generated scaled pages to the attention of Web Spam Team I guess.
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